INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
September 21, 2008
Tom Mighell

Welcome to Issue #311 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

And away we go.....

News Update -- from the Inter Alia Weblog

Blawgs of the Week
This week, let's take a look at some state-specific blogs, with two from Ohio:

  • Here's a blog for business owners and lawyers in Ohio: titled Ohio Practical Business Law, it offers "practical guidance for making legally informed business decisions." It's published by Teri Rasmussen, an attorney at the Columbus-based firm of Lane, Alton & Horst. The blog is "intended to provide information sufficiently detailed to be useful while remaining accessible to intelligent businessmen and women who may not be lawyers, but still find they need to make decisions affected by legal issues."
  • The Florida Special Needs Law Blog provides insight and commentary on SSI benefits, special needs trusts and Medicaid. It's published by David Lillesand, a partner in the Miami/Gainesville firm of Lillesand & Wolasky.
  • Pennsylvania Fiduciary Litigation is brought to you by Patti Spencer, a Pennsylvania trusts and estates lawyer and expert witness. She's discussing such topics as business succession, disinheritance, powers of attorney, pre-nuptial agreements, scrivener liability, and more.
  • Joe Bornstein is a Portland, Maine personal injury lawyer, having practice there for more than 33 years. At his Maine Injury, Accident & Disability Law blog, he's discussing basic personal injury topics, and how they apply to Maine residents.
  • The Cleveland firm of Frantz Ward is discussing renewable energy and climate change, among other things, at the Ohio Environmental Law Blog. It's published by Joe Koncelik, an attorney with the firm.

Help Desk

This week, I'm starting a series of tips on the best way to recycle your computer. Donating a computer to a charity is a great way to get rid of an old PC, and there are a few sites that will help you find a donation center in your area -- they include Earth 911, the CEA's MyGreenElectronics.org, and the Electronic Industry Alliance.

The first tip is pretty basic: back up your files. Make sure you have all the files you might need before you wipe it clean (which we'll cover next week). Windows XP has a backup utility, which will back up your files to an external hard drive. To get to it in XP, go to your Start menu and select All Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, and then Backup. There are also dozens of software backup programs available -- I don't have a lot of experience with the software programs, but the one I do use is an online product called Mozy -- this service provides continuous backup of all my important files, and it works great. You can get 2GB of backup for free -- and an unlimited plan only costs $4.95/month.

Some of the recommended software backup programs are: EMC Retrospect, NovaBACKUP, and NTI Backup.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

U.S. Minimum Wage Laws
Here's a helpful resource on the minimum wage laws from all 50 states. The map shows at a glance how each state's laws compare with the federal statute. When you click on a state, you can view the current rate and any future effective rate, along with information on whether premium pay is given after a designated number of hours.

The Nephron Information Center
The home page for this site is a mess, but it has a ton of great information. It's maintained by a doctor as a public service, to make everyone more aware of kidney disease. The news area is really helpful, with links to general news topics as well as clinical nephrology, medicare and policy, financial news, pharma, science, technology, and more; even better, each section has its own RSS feed, so you can subscribe to recent kidney news in all of these areas. He's also currently got a listing of dialysis units closed due to Hurricane Ike, and where you can go instead.

titleX.com($$)
Compared to the previous site, this is spartan in its home page design. titleX provides research and document delivery to real estate and title professionals, as well as the general public. Right now, searching only available in Texas and Washington state counties -- but not all of the counties for each state. You can search the land-based records, and purchase them for "tokens," which cost 25 cents each. The average Basic Search charge is $1-$2, with an Advanced Search costing around $10.

RJ&L Religious Liberty Archive
The Colorado firm of Rothberger Johnson & Lyons provides this archive, an extensive repository for anyone researching state and federal laws regarding religious freedom in the Unites States. The site features links to state and federal constitutions and statutes, and provides just those provisions that deal with religion. You can also browse a collection of religious liberty cases, historical materials, articles and treatises, as well as a great page of other links on the subject.

Scitation (Free-$$)
Scitation is the relaunched version of the Online Journal Publishing Service -- it's a search engine that provides access to more than one million documents from scholarly journals, magazines, conference proceedings from scientific societies and technical publishers. There are actually a number of databases to search here -- in addition to Scitation, you can search SPIN (Searchable Physics Information Notices), PubMed/MEDLINE, and the Scitopia database, a vertical search tools with access to more than 3 million documents. Some of the documents are free, while others will cost you around $25 to download. You can also create an RSS feed from your search, so you'll be alerted when new documents are available.

Finally, a few fun and interesting sites to start out your week:

Want to learn a new language? Check out busuu, a language-learning community site. It's free!

Why would you want to launch a hedgehog into space? Because you can. Check out Hedgehog Launch.

Well, that’s it for Issue #311 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.

Tom Mighell

Now available: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell

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